by Jeff Kirkham
Instead, Noah had plucked a patriotic, holy war from a forgotten cassette tape, had electrified it with his dashing smile, and had rallied hundreds of simple people to their deaths. Now their children’s bodies baked in the noonday sun like carp in a dried-up pond.
Noah had tried to avoid seeing this. He’d been told about the massacre of Artesia by one of the fighters from the Border Patrol school. Despite himself, he pulled over along Highway 82 to stop and see the killing fields with his own eyes. He’d resolved to drive west and hopefully die in a hail of bullets somewhere before he reached the end of the road. Before leaving the area for good, he’d pulled over to drink in the full price of his victory.
Noah leaned across the hood of the Land Cruiser, his face in his hands. He began counting the bodies. Again, he stopped himself.
More than he could count.
That’s all he would ever know. He’d made decisions and got people pumped up to fight and now the dead numbered more-than-he-could-count. When he’d destroyed his own family by screwing with the cartels, that’d been just two dead. Now, he’d killed hundreds—probably thousands—based on a whim, set in motion by his crying jag on the road to Hermosillo.
More than four years ago, his personal Armageddon began on a whim too. Noah had grown tired of his dogs barking their fool heads off at night when cartel pack trains crossed his land, loaded down with drugs. He had already alerted the Border Patrol to the cartel point of crossing, but it became apparent that the Border Patrol monitored hundreds, maybe thousands, of crossings just like the one at the south end of his ranch. The Super Troopers, as locals called them, did nothing.
So, Noah got clever. He waited for winter and painstakingly dug up a patch of western poison ivy at the far end of Bill’s ranch. Then he transplanted the poison ivy in clumps all along the fence where the smugglers liked to cross. Every day, when he ran water out to the stock tanks, he passed by the poison ivy in his four-wheeler and gave it a sprinkle. To his delight, the transplants exploded, and by late summer the border fence, the wash and the riverbanks were crawling with poison ivy. He sniggered every time he rumbled past the fence line. He knew from firsthand experience the living hell it was to endure poison ivy and he delighted in the knowledge that his biological weapon had cartel tough guys scratching their balls and scouring for home remedies. Nothing took a hard man down quite like a burning rash over his entire body.
Noah’s dogs quit barking at night, and Noah bragged to his wife over his triumph.
Clever-ass Rancher: One. Cartels: Zero.
Then they came for his family. Somehow, the cartel deduced that the poison ivy was intentional. Noah would never know how.
He did everything he could to wall out memories of that evening when they came to kill his wife and daughter, but one bit of it stuck in his mind. The one scene jumped straight up like a startled cat every time he thought of that afternoon.
He remembered one of the filthy smugglers putting his hand on his daughter’s perfect throat. The smuggler hadn’t strangled her. Instead, a few minutes later as the sun worked its way down to the west mountains, he shot both his wife and daughter in the head.
Seeing their beautiful brains turn to mist in his front yard wasn’t really the scene that stuck in Noah’s mind. It was the look in his two year-old daughter’s eyes when the smuggler put his dirty hand all the way around her throat—her eyes went wide and her cheeks quivered. Those eyes and those cheeks revealed her sudden awakening into the real world. That brutal world that had nothing whatsoever in common with her Disney princess movies or her mother’s relentless love.
Noah watched as that man erased her innocence moments before he ended her life. What stuck in Noah’s memory, like a long-dead tick buried too deep to remove, was the look in her eyes, not just of fear, but of betrayal. He had violated the pact between a father and a daughter. He saw in her eyes the sum total of all the ways his manhood had been an utter joke.
Noah drowned that look in his daughter’s eyes beneath countless bottles of Jack Daniels, and the guilt that’d once stunned him like a steer taking a hammer to the head had abated over the years.
In the fog of that forgetfulness, he’d once again fallen for his own sham; that listening to his warrior father talk about war somehow made him a warrior himself. Noah could sell it all day long and twice on Sunday: he could regurgitate warrior-speak and military acronyms that lit up the battle-lust in other men.
“We’ll set a two-click perimeter around the AO and drop plunging fire on top of the fuel storage tanks from here, here and here.”
Those were the precise words Noah had used, over a map, to finally assure the Texans that he knew what the hell he was talking about. His well-honed warrior-talk had convinced those wind-burned old men that defeating cartel would be a clean, surgical affair. They’d all rolled into Artesia believing that their huge bullets would fall only on inanimate objects and those bullets would blast fear into the hearts of smaller men. They’d been led to believe that they could destroy things without being dirtied by real war.
Better than anyone on earth, Noah should’ve known: he could choose when and how to attack, but his adversary would then get his own turn.
Maybe the Texans headed back east without seeing the fields of the dead and without smelling the cooked flesh of women and children.
Guilt poured down his back. Noah actually fucking cared what the Texans thought of him, and that realization drove his self-hatred deep. Even as he stood over the rotting victims of his recklessness, he weighed what other men might think of him. He dishonored the dead with his vanity. How different was he, really, from the monsters that had massacred this town? What possible penance could scratch the surface of what he’d done in his galactic arrogance?
He should stay and bury the dead. He should face the cost of his personal crusade against the cartel. But he knew he wouldn’t. He would move on, tracking the narcos like a dog, driven by raw instinct. He would leave these killing fields behind to mix with his road dust, and when the opportunity presented itself, he would bury this too, under a mountain of whiskey.
Noah climbed into the driver seat of his Land Cruiser and turned the key in the ignition. The radio blared to life.
“You are still the potter and I am the clay,
And though I know I am too proud…”
Noah mashed the eject button and the tape spat out. He snatched it out of the cassette deck and threw the tape out the window. The tape spun across the road and landed in a bitterbrush. He slammed the Cruiser in gear and stomped on the gas pedal. The Cruiser lurched onto the road and roared west down Highway 82, slipping in behind the cross-hatched track left in the asphalt by the Abrams tanks. He didn’t know how the cartel had gotten their hands on tanks and it probably didn’t matter at this point. The specter of fifty tanks added to his realization that he’d drastically underestimated them: he’d underestimated their brutality and he’d underestimated their ability to wage war. He was nothing in comparison to this level of violence and power. These were no petty, Mexican criminals. These were men of iron will and sobering resourcefulness.
Capturing even one American tank would’ve been an accomplishment. Capturing fifty main battle tanks put this cartel on the path to dominion over the region, and maybe more.
All that was left for him was to follow the churned up furrows left by the tanks in the hot blacktop. Noah could follow, but he would no longer pretend to wage war on the invading army. Not ever again. He wouldn’t wager his secondhand warfighter act against these men of power and violence. He wouldn’t rally men and their families to die for his personal fantasies.
The best he could hope for now was to throw his own life on the pyre of those who had already died. If he could contribute some small thing with his death, it would be the best he could do for them, impersonator that he was.
Noah slammed the brakes and the Cruiser chirped to a stop. A blue puff of smoke curled around the vehicle and whipped away in the wind.
Up ahead, a white grocery sack danced on a gentle updraft from the desert floor. It bobbled and looped toward the road. Then it whipped out across the rolling hills. Noah squinted and followed as the trash bird lilted into the distance, taunting gravity and denying the earth’s hold.
Noah exhaled and kneaded the steering wheel. Emotions flushed through his gut, crossing like the mad currents before a tsunami. He closed his eyes and sighed.
He worked the Cruiser into a three point turn across the deserted highway and pointed back the way he had come. He doubled back on Highway 82 and stopped at the bitterbrush. He climbed down from the Cruiser and picked the cassette tape out of the branches. He returned to the Cruiser and made another laborious turn, resuming his shadow, ten miles behind the cartel convoy. The cassette tape dangled between two fingers as Noah shifted the Cruiser and regained highway speed.
After he hit fourth gear and the Cruiser settled into highway speeds, he tossed the cassette tape, side-arm, into the back of the Land Cruiser. It cracked against the window and dropped into the rear compartment.
Chapter 32
Tavo Castillo
Pemex Refinery, La Cadereyta, Outside Monterrey, Nuevo Leon Mexico
Somewhere between San Antonio and Laredo, Tavo had a very bad phone conversation with his daughter. He had sent Alejandro west with half the company of M1 Abrams tanks with strict instructions to avoid cities and to join up with Beto at the Navajo Army Depot. It would consume all the gas just to get there, but it would consolidate his army in one place, halfway to Salt Lake City.
Without firing a shot, Beto swept into the Navajo Army Depot that morning; fifty tanks against an Army security team. Base security had surrendered at the gate. Last they spoke, Beto had been inventorying the underground ammunition bunkers.
But that victory was in the past, a vanishing sunrise against a rising storm. Tavo churned with frustration while his Humvee weaved between Texas towns, avoiding the worst of the apocalypse like a cutter navigating reef-choked waters. In the distance, he could see the twisting, black snakes of Texas oilfields and refineries burning off their lode of fuel.
Tavo had called Sofía on the satellite phone, and the conversation cranked his resolve to Level Ten. His decision to leave the tanks in Arizona and travel to Monterrey had been prescient. His daughter was digging in her feet, refusing to give him any gasoline from the Monterrey refinery. He’d been wise to get on the road, even before he knew for sure she’d resist him.
As he pulled up to the gate at the Pemex Refinery, Tavo took a deep breath, then a long exhale. Arrayed at the gate and inside the fence, stood the second largest military force between Mexico City and his own company of tanks at the Navajo Depot.
Thousands of Mexican soldiers occupied the Monterrey refinery, transforming the industrial site into an ad hoc Mexican military base. General Bautista must’ve consolidated army units from the entire region to this one location, even scrounging a few light armored vehicles to top it off.
Tavo very much disliked the setup. He never negotiated from a posture of weakness, but his daughter had drawn battle lines during their sat phone call: she would not allow Mexican gas to cross the American border. He would make his stand here, and one way or another, he would leave with the fuel.
Tavo concluded that this was her big play—her backup plan to having him arrested in Guatemala. She would face him down with troops while his own forces starved for fuel, surrounded by hostiles. Part of him wanted to shoot her in the chest. The other part wanted to destroy her army first, then force her to bow to him as her benefactor and father. Either way, General Bautista, her lackey, would die a gruesome death. That much, Tavo had already decided.
The gate guard let the Humvee through, and Tavo’s driver pulled into a parking lot, now filled with temporary offices, military tents and communications antennas. Sofía and her general climbed down the steps of an office trailer as Tavo’s Humvee pulled to a stop.
Her beauty in the waning light of afternoon gave him pause. The oblique sunshine drew out the red tones in her cheeks and lit up the green-on-green glint in her eyes. Despite their earlier argument on the phone, she smiled, the same smile she always wore when she reunited with her father after time apart. She didn’t seem surprised to see him. Tavo’s iron resolve flagged, his red-hot anger cooled.
Then the general stepped through the doorway behind her, stoney-faced and resolute. The old bureaucrat was fat around the middle, Tavo noted with disdain. True fighting men never grow soft. He wondered if the fat general and his daughter were sleeping together.
“Papi!” She ran across the parking lot and kissed him on the cheek. He couldn’t blame the general for falling into her trap. Her beauty and feigned innocence had been tailored to captivate men.
“You didn’t drive all this way to continue our little debate, did you?” She looked at him askance, a smile in her voice.
“Sofía, don’t be difficult. The gas I need won’t even put a dent in Mexico’s reserve. And you’re still producing oil in the Gulf. Mexico is at no risk of running out of gas.” Tavo found himself arguing with her instead of killing people.
“Thanks to your daughter, Mexico is at no risk of running out of gas.” The general interrupted and reached out a hand to Tavo. “Otherwise, this refinery would be on fire just like every refinery in Texas. She convinced me to protect critical fuel assets. Now our gasoline production has launched us ahead of the rest of the world. She’s a Mexican patriot. You should be very proud.”
Tavo brushed aside the compliment. “I just came from America and they’re in total chaos. They need our help, especially in the southwest.”
The general grunted. “Is that what you’re doing across the border? Helping Americans?”
The general didn’t realize that he’d just signed his death warrant.
Tavo countered for the sake of argument with his daughter, not really caring what the General thought. “We’re stabilizing the region. Northern Sonora cannot survive if Americans are pouring across the border with military-capable weapons, stealing our food and water. I’m pacifying the border region for our self-preservation.”
“How can you pacify millions of armed Americans?” the general raised his eyebrows. “Even their police have better weapons than the army of northern Mexico.”
“I have a hundred M1 Abrams tanks under my command.”
The general shuffled his feet, obviously shaken by the revelation. Just two of those tanks could destroy his entire army.
“Regardless,” Sofía interrupted. “We don’t have enough gas for adventures into America. We only have enough gas to get Mexico back on its feet. We can transport the winter harvest and hold back starvation in Mexico with this gas, right here in Monterrey. We don’t have enough to pacify the United States, or whatever it is you’re doing, Papi.”
“Sofía, I’m not talking about fighting a war. I need enough gas to protect the border. My tanks need enough fuel to return to Phoenix and then reposition across the frontier. We only need maybe a hundred thousand gallons—not even ten percent of just one of these tanks,” Tavo waved at the refinery. “We can defend the border with so little gas that it’d be a mathematical rounding error to you.”
In strict terms, Tavo only needed enough gas to come back to this refinery with a handful of tanks and wipe these idiots off the map. If this little army refused to concede the fuel he needed, he would attack. This pompous prick and his make-believe soldiers would be dead and smoking like charcoal by this time next week. Of course, if he could leave here with the fuel he wanted, perhaps he might let them survive another week. Maybe two.
“We’ve done the math,” Sofía shot back, fire in her eyes. “We know the amount of fuel it’ll require to feed Mexico. We know down to the gallon what it’ll take, and that doesn’t account for fuel theft. We don’t expect your deal with the Zeta cartel to hold.”
Tavo checked the general’s face to see if he had known about Tavo’s treaty with the Zetas. The genera
l’s eyebrows shot up. He apparently hadn’t known that Tavo engineered the end of the Zeta’s fuel thievery. General Bautista was probably just now realizing that Tavo had much more power than he had originally assumed. His daughter hadn’t told him that Tavo was a major narcotraficante. The general’s eyes shifted back and forth, weighing the new realization.
He must be thinking a great many new things. Tavo smiled.
If Tavo were the kind of man to rein in the Zetas, what did that make him? The Zetas were the most-feared cartel in Northern Mexico. Bautista must be concluding that Tavo wasn’t the kind of person he should jerk around.
The implications played across the general’s face—the new danger to his life must have dawned on him like an icicle down his back. The only thing more frightening than a cartel boss who could shut down the Zetas would be a cartel boss with a hundred M1 Abrams tanks. The general cleared his throat.
“Miss Castillo. I think we can make this accommodation. We have over a hundred fuel trucks parked in the back lot and several hundred more on their way. I think we should send a hundred trucks with gas enough for your father and his men to protect the border. We can replace the gas in two days. I think we should do it.” The general looked to Tavo for approval.
Sofía’s face churned, frustration knit into her eyebrows. Once again, her father had out-weighed her. “No farther north than Tucson. That’s all the buffer we need and that’s all the fuel you’re going to get. A hundred thousand gallons has to last your army forever, so they best stay close.” Sofía jammed her hands on top of her hips. Tavo felt the urge to slap her but he forced himself to relax instead.
Does she forget who she’s talking to?
He had funded her every move in school and then in business. Tavo had deftly engineered the largest drug cartel the world had ever seen, and he had done it without anyone knowing his name. He had killed many men and had assaulted a dozen hard targets personally. He was probably one of the top five combat firearm masters in Mexico, and he had tested that ability against the finest fighting men in Mexico and abroad, all of whom now rested forever in wooden boxes. What girl would stand before him with her hands on her hips and tell him the rules of the game he had contrived?